With Bruno
Ganz, Alexandra
Maria, Corinna Harfouch
Warner
Brothers Entertainment
FILM ESSAY
BY GORANA OGNJENOVIC
Going to
the cinema to see this film was an exciting
time, expectations were running high. Finally we would see a more
realistic
vision of what had happened. More or less all of us were aware of the
fact that
the only films accessible to us on this theme were made by some or
other
American film company as war and post-war propaganda. 50 years after
the fact Germany is
showing their vision of it, a fresh contribution
after 50 years of clichés on the theme. When marking the 50
years since events
took place, we thought that things had changed, we were hoping to hear
and see
something more, something different from what we were force fed with
until
now.
We
were disappointed more or less immediately as the
first images were revealed to us on the big screen.None of this would ever even try to say how Germany was under
dictatorship of the national socialists.
The reading was all to simple, as if all Germans were national
socialists and
all national socialists were Germans, and no matter from which side of
this
equation you start, it makes no difference to how ridiculous it sounds.
On the
other hand one might say that there was a slight difference to this
German
version. This version made a serious effort to create an image of
Hitler as
‘caring employer’, it tried to envision Goebbels as a
humane killer of his own
children, and it even tried to blame the actions of Hitler’s
secretary on her
blissfully ignorance. Sadly enough it made absolutely no effort to show
how a
humane nation has been taken over and driven by an inhumane regime.
Still, 50
years on, even in the German version, the White Rose never made it onto
the big
screen.
Zygmunt
Bauman argued some time ago how it all was the
point of evolution where Germany found
itself at the time made the execution of the
Holocaust possible. That was hard to see in this particular version.
The
hierarchy of the Third Reich was in this version presented like any
other top
of the power scale. Kings chambers were full of individuals that
usually
surround man of power. There was king’s full (Himmler as
megalomaniac and
antique dealer), there were the insane scientists (Goebbels who not
only
performed experiments on prisoners but also on himself), there were
blind
followers (military personnel), there were conspirators (the group of
military
personnel who made few attempts to assassin the Fuehrer), there were
the
careerists (Speer), and there were the loyal servants (SS). Some things
just
never change.
At the
same time it was very striking how the last
days of the Third Reich have been described as the end of a nation that
had
done wrong. Some of us expected actually to see something more than the
last
signs of life on a boat that is slowly sinking, after all the rats had
left.
What we got was a description of a panic that ruled amongst the
soldiers that
suddenly appear as defenders of the German nation instead of being army
forces
representing the dictatorship by which German nation was actually
terrorised.
The film even gives a vague idea of dilemma, some sort of bizarre
question of
loyalty divided in two, loyalty to one’s nation and loyalty
towards the Fuehrer
as if they themselves were never a part of the dictatorship that had
been
terrorising the nation the entire time. Diverse description was
obviously not
the goal of this film expedition.
And
then eventually the film was over. At last but not
the least the narrative stops at a very specific point in time. There
was no
mention of the bombing of Dresden as the
Allied revenge. There was no mention of the
rape of 50 000 German women ‘on command’ by Russian
soldiers, on the night
that Berlin had
‘fallen’. The fact that there were so many other
European ‘entrepreneurs’ that eagerly contributed to the
execution of the
‘final solution’ who will never be punished for their acts,
of course was never
mentioned. As if none of this ever happened.
We came
out of the cinema thinking that this was one
of the biggest disappointments so far exactly because this experience,
the
German version of what was happening those days, never amounted to
anything
more but another product of Hollywood post war
propaganda industry. Some
things
never change, after fifty years that passed by, the wrap paper might
appear
fancier, but the content remains the same.
The
question of why is it still important to give
people such one-sided, deceptive versions of history remains hanging in
the
air.
